


Something's Wrong

by LyricOcean



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Bae Ending, F/F, No idea where I was really going with this one, Sad twist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-23
Updated: 2018-10-23
Packaged: 2019-08-04 23:28:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16356353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LyricOcean/pseuds/LyricOcean
Summary: A short, sad take on a possibility for the Bae ending.





	Something's Wrong

**Author's Note:**

> Literally nobody asked for this, it's cheesy as fuck, and it's too short. Avoid reading if you don't like blood and illness. Anyway, enjoy!

She still remembered every detail of Chloe’s face that night, tearstained and beautiful, hiding under the blanket like she was scared the world would find her.

Max stroked Chloe’s face with shaking fingers and said nothing. She was under the blanket too. They breathed together, heavily, letting the stress of the day be absorbed by their shared warmth.

They’d chosen the cheapest motel they could find, of course. There was a lack of love written on the walls in a thin, shaking hand: nobody who came here wanted to be here. Not really. The cheap, lampless lightbulb seemed to congeal the air particles with its yellowed gaze.

Max and Chloe supplied the love from within: holding and kissing, their legs intertwined, their heart rates seeming to synchronise perfectly.

“I can’t believe you chose me,” Chloe murmured, at one point in the night. The wind whistled outside the window as she spoke, threatening to drown her out. “All those people…” she let herself trail off. They’d been speaking in a lot of incomplete sentences.

“I love you,” Max told her, kissing the tears from her lips.

That had been the end of that conversation. 

Max can still taste those lips on hers as she stands at their old lighthouse hangout.

The Bay lies as a steaming, blackened husk below her. The town she grew up in. The town she sacrificed. So many people dead. She’s unsure whether she feels everything or nothing at all. There are times when the emotion catches in her throat, a tugging in the pit of her heart that threatens to rise up as bile. There are other times where she simply watches, thinking nothing and feeling nothing at all.

The coughing, that was the start of it.

Max could never forget the sound. Wet. Wrong. Constant. The panicked look in Chloe’s eyes, so blue, so beautiful, as she examined the red she’d coughed up on her hand. She'd slowed down on the road and pulled into a stop, casting the car into shade from the old oak above. 

“We’ll get you to a hospital,” Max had said, feeling reptilian, icewater. “It’s probably just inflammation from all that smoking." Chloe had been almost constantly high since they'd left the Bay. Unable to deal with reality.

Max had tried to smile at her partner, waggling a finger. “Now you’ve _got_ to promise me you’ll give it up.”

Chloe had said that she would. She wiped her hand on the grass outside and they continued driving. Neither of them spoke, each hoping the other would drop the subject.

Then Chloe said, “Something’s wrong, Max." Chloe didn't make eye contact, just watched the drizzle out the window. It hadn’t stopped raining since the storm.

She repeated herself, over the thunder. “Something’s hella wrong.”

The lighthouse is no longer standing. It was blown away by the tornado, seeming to take half the clifftop with it. If one were to look downwards off the cliff, they could still see its weathered, fragmented husk in the tide below. Max doesn't look down. She edges around the lighthouse's torn out base, careful not to slip in the mud. She needs to get to the bench. When her hand touches the planks of its armrest it seems to her like an old friend, weathered and layered with memory after memory.

 _“Forever.”_ She mouths the words under her breath. Words spoken a lifetime ago.

“One month,” the doctor had said. He’d looked them in the eyes as he told them. Max appreciated that. It felt as though he’d ripped the ribcage from her body.

The night after they'd found out had been as bad as the first. Max had held Chloe as she cried, the two of them shaking like lost children. Chloe was coughing more even then, staining the pillows burgundy. They were in another cheap motel room, different yet practically identical to the last. It was as if, for all their travel, they'd still gotten nowhere. It was unbearable. How do you describe a feeling like that? Where do you begin? What is there to say?

Standing there watching the waves smash the cliffside far beneath her, Max has nothing more to say.

The sea salt breeze whips around her face, threatening to tear her coat off. She barely seems to notice it. She holds the box in her hands, all that remains of her girlfriend. Reduced to ashes like the rest of the town. Max knows she could go down the mental rabbithole of how she couldn’t save either of them, how she’s failed at everything, how she’s utterly devoid of worth. Instead, she doesn’t think anything. She's strangely at peace.

Hugging the box to her chest, her beating heart alien against the polished wood, she walks to the edge of the cliff.

There's no scream as she falls.


End file.
